Second Sphere Economic Rules

Budgets

Sphere operates on a quarterly budget system; at a nominal and estimated game speed of one RL week equalling one game month, this means one budget budget must be generated every three weeks.

Budgets are important for nation play in Sphere; they are where much of a nation's long-term actions happen. While unglamorous they will do much to shape a nation's future. A list of some of the important things that happen in a budget are as follows:

Industrial production (both PIP and CIP)

Production of resources (primarily Dust)

Discretionary funding allocation ('wealth')

Trade income

Diplomatic actions and expenditures

Economic growth

R&D expenditures

General upkeep (logistics, etc)

Expeditions

Random events

Industries (PIP and CIP)

PIP (Primary Industrial Production) and CIP (Complex Industrial Production) are the two elements of a nation’s industrial output. PIP represents bulk production – mining, low-complexity factories, etc. By contrast, CIP represents high-precision, low-volume manufacturing, primarily electronics and other micro-scale objects. To a certain extent these values (like all economic values) are holistic; they are more a measure of ability to perform a given industrial task than an actual quantifiable measure such as ‘X thousand tons of steel’.

Given the variability of nation and the governmental system, industries represent facilities directly owned and operated by the state, long-term production contracts to the government or any permutation in between. What matters is they are productive ability directly available to the state. What they do not represent is the entirety of a nation's productive capacity - though one can assume that a high industrial value generally correlates to a large civilian industrial sector.

Industry that is not used in a quarter is wasted; industry cannot be banked.

A nation that cannot complete a given item in one quarter can carry unfinished items to the next quarter.

Resources

'Resources' is a catch-all term for specific, sufficiently valuable and easily portable resources used in industrial production that they are tracked seperately. Most typically this is Dust - theotechnological nanocomputers capable of locally modifying physical constants. Dust and its upgraded derivatives (Theta and Omega dust) underpin much of modern technology, despite being black boxes.

All resources are portable and any excess is stockpiled; conversely, excess requirements are pulled from stockpiles.

Funding (Wealth)

Like industry, wealth is a holistic measure of monetary expenditures, manpower and some intangibles, such as intellectual property, software, etc. Wealth is the main medium of exchange in Sphere and as such plays a pivotal role in task such as hiring and supporting militaries, expanding economies and buying things from (N)PCs.

Wealth, like industries, essentially represents discretionary/exceptional expenditures and national-level slush funds and only very generally relates to actual national GDP. Various day to day expenditures such as pensions, healthcare, education and so on can be assumed to happen in the background. Even nations that do not have a currency per se still have 'wealth', in the sense of mobilizable state resources.

Wealth, like resources, is bankable over quarters.

Economic Growth

Economic Sectors

Nations grow organically over time and thus every quarter a nation can invest into growing its economy - or more specifically, growing the parts that are directly of interest and relevance to gameplay. The limits upon doing so are explained below.

Every quarter, a state may buy a number of points up to its Civilian Tech Index and apply them however it choses to PIP, CIP or Wealth. Each point costs 5 Wealth and increases the economic value by 1.

In addition, a state may increase its infrastructure by its growth rating (normally 1.5%) at the values below:

+5 PIP costs 25 PIP or 5 Wealth, or 35 CIP

+5 CIP costs 25 CIP or wealth, or 35 CIP

+5 Wealth costs 25 wealth, or 35 PIP/CIP

In all cases, round down to the nearest 5.

For every growth multiplier (ie, 3% growth per quarter, 6%, etc) the cost doubles. So growing at 3% would mean every +5 wealth costs 50 wealth per. Note that the doubling applies to all growth in a given sector, not just that which exceeds the cap.

Population

Population grows at an undefined rate per quarter, increasing population production with it. TBA.

Resources

New dust output costs 10 PIP, 10 CIP and 10 Wealth per. specifics of how much TBA.

Expeditions

A state may launch one Expedition a quarter. The results and returns of the expedition are based on the chosen destination, the amount of resouces allocated and a dose of luck.